Memory,
like the organ, is an instrument capable of infusing the most secular
music with spiritual sounds.

--
James McConkey

When
I was in the first grade, my favorite song was John Denverís "Rocky
Mountain High." I was a little confused when I heard it -- figurative
language still eluded me. How could a boy be born in his twenty-seventh
year? How could he be hanging by a song? But I didnít like the song
any less for not knowing. I scratched the LP playing that same cut
over and over. I tried to memorize the words and at bedtime I sang
into my pillow as much as I could remember.

I know
it isn't cool to like John Denver anymore, and perhaps never was,
but in the way that every younger child is hostage to the musical
taste of the older sibling in the house, I was hostage to my older
sister Maryís record collection. Mary, the oldest of my parentsí four
children, was the only child responsible enough to collect records,
the only one with any real knowledge of the world beyond our house
and yard, so the music in her wire record rack became ours for better
or worse.

After
a nightly bath, Mary, my other sister Ruth, and I would slip our wet
heads through the collars of our nightclothes and kneel in front of
my motherís rocking chair. Mom would part my hair with a comb then
pull a brush through my sistersí tangled manes. The girls teetered
a bit under her gentle tugs, shifting from knee to knee as my mother
brushed. Then the three of us made our way to the living room and
placed ourselves on the floor in front of an old sea chest, on top
of which my parents had placed the turntable. My sisters sat cross-legged
in matching polyester nightgowns, threadbare at the knees. I remember
the bottoms of our feet were still pink from the warm bath water.

Of all
that we listened to, I liked the folky Denver best. Hearing "Rocky
Mountain High" and songs like it made me feel warm. This was
what I called love when I was a boy, this warm feeling, and while
the song was playing I felt it for my sisters there assembled, for
my mother in the next room in front of the t.v., for my father and
my baby brother Jimmy already in bed. I felt it for the pretty ladies
I knew, like my teacher Miss Webb, Mrs. Fannen from our church, Olivia
Newton-John.

We speak
of our waking dreams in terms of what is to come, the future, but
surely we can dream about the past too. I suspect thatís all memory
is, a dream we dream about the way things were, no more true and no
less fantastical than other kinds of dreams. True or not, it can be
a kind of salvation.

The
night John Denver crashed his glider Icharus-like into the Pacific,
I was driving from my home in Nebraska to where my younger sister
Ruth lives in Missouri. My wife had filed for divorce the month before,
and I was seeking the solace of family. It was 1997, my own twenty-seventh
year.

I heard
the news of Denverís death on a Kansas City radio station. I pulled
off the interstate to find a record store and bought a John Denver
cassette, the same album my sister had owned. His greatest hits. On
the cover, Denver sits amid tall mountain grass, wearing a blue down
vest and grinning broadly.

I had
not heard "Rocky Mountain High" in a long time. I played
it on the tape deck as soon as my little black car was back on the
highway. There in the car, I felt the warm feeling again, simple as
ever, though by that time I understood how a boy might be born again
at such an age, and hoped it would happen to me. And I knew how a
song could tether you to the things you love in this world: the gentle
strokes of a hair brush, warm bath water, your little sister just
a few miles further down the road.

Bob
Cowser Jr. is assistant professor of English and director of the
creative writing track at St. Lawrence University. His work
has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Sonora Review,
Sycamore Review, American Literary Review, Prairie
Schooner, Missouri Review and elsewhere. He lives
on the Grasse River in northern New York state with his wife and two
sons, Jake and Jackson.